How do you figure out where our tribal instincts will lead us astray? The Truth Seekers Handbook features a science-based guide to blending emotions and logic effectively. Gleb Tsipursky, with his nonprofit Intentional Insights, weighs heart and mind in order to strike effective decision making and wise thinking. To be skeptical of information that we get and to be critical is a learned behavior. Just because it said so in the internet doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true. What do you value? What do you actually want to achieve? And are you willing to balance emotion and reason in order to get there?

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The Truth Seekers Handbook With Gleb Tsipursky

I have with me Gleb Tsipursky. He is passionate about promoting science-based decision-making and emotional and social intelligence to help leaders and organizations and our society avoid disasters. He's a scholar, entrepreneur, author, speaker, consultant and activist. He runs the non-profit Intentional Insights and is a professor at Ohio State. He's authored a number of books, most notably the Amazon best-seller, The Truth Seekers Handbook: A Science-Based Guide. I have to tell you that got my attention and I reached out and said, "Gleb, I want you here." Thanks for being a guest here, Gleb.

It's great to be here.

How did you get really brought in to the science-based decision-making? How did that come up and what's your mission?

I saw that people around me where making decisions the way that was really harmful for them. I really care about people and don't want them to make harmful decisions for themselves. It started with my family, I saw my parents making harmful decisions, bad decisions. I saw my society around me making bad decisions. The government, the business owners and so on. With Wells Fargo right now, they made really bad decisions a year ago to let their sales people just sell big accounts and so on. That's resulting in disaster for the company and all companies that go bankrupt now. It's just so sad to see people go bankrupt and lose a lot of money, lose a lot of resources because of these bad decisions. That's what we’re passionate about it and I don't want to see people suffer and that's why I do what I do.

I just love it. I'm really very aligned because I have seen people who unfortunately haven't stopped, really used a good way of making a decision, have gone and done something, and afterwards said, " I wished I had really thought that through." Any advice if we're trying to make a decision about whatever it might be? Something in our business, something in our organization, any decision-making tips that you can give us?

When people think about formal decision making, they usually think about a large reason. That's actually not the case. What we need to think about is looking at combining effectively our emotions without reason. Our hearts, not minds, to make good decisions. It's so important to align them appropriately. People usually don't know how to align their hearts and their minds appropriately so they end up with their hearts and their minds are fighting with each other. That's not a good way to make decisions. A really effective way of making decisions is to take it out with your emotions what you actually want to achieve. What do you value? That's a heart question, emotions question. The logic question is how do you get there? Separating out these two parts of the decision-making puzzle and letting your emotions speak to what you want to achieve and your logic speak to the problem-solving strategies of how you want to get there is much healthier.

I love that you said that.